Vegan Chicken Fried Steak

I depart for my RTW trip on Tuesday and I decided to have one last dinner gathering before I leave. The theme? Country dinner!!

Miguel made biscuits and gravy.

Kasia made rosemary mashed potatoes.

And we had green beans, broccoli, grilled mushroom and onions, lemonade and orange juice.

I’ve been wanting to make vegan chicken fried steaks forever, so I finally got around to doing it. I’m not very good at frying things, so I was a little worried they wouldn’t turn very well. But…they turned out great!

The seitan recipe I usually use is from the cookbook Vegan with a Vengeance. It’s a really good recipe, but I decided to compare a few other seitan recipes and combine parts I liked from each. Here are some other recipes I looked at:

3. Mix the wet and dry ingredients in a large bowl and knead the dough until it becomes spongy and elastic.

4. Pull small chunks off the dough and try your best to stretch, smush, and smash them into small flat patties. The texture is pretty odd and stretchy, so this is a difficult task to do. They kinda look like lumpy cookies – not very appetizing looking, but neither is raw chicken.

5. Let the patties sit for a few minutes while you prepare the broth (see vegetable broth idea below).

Vegan Vegetable Broth

I made a quick vegetable broth from things I had at the house: fresh oregano, fresh parley, tomato paste, molasses, dried sage, Marmite, cayenne pepper, asfoetida powder (kinda tastes like onion and garlic powder mixed together). I added all these things to a large pot of water. You could really add all kinds of things to the broth…this is just what I had.

6. Place seitan pieces in the broth, bring the broth to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover, and gently simmer for about 90 minutes.

*The seitan recipes I’ve read say that the seitan should be simmered in the broth rather than boiled because that will prevent it from puffing up so much. They were probably right about that – my seitan patties tripled in size once they were boiled. This wasn’t a problem…they were just VERY large (which actually helped stick to the country theme of serving large portions of meat at a meal). Next time I make the steaks though, I’ll pay attention to that tip and try simmering them in hopes that it will help keep the seitan steaks thinner.

7. Remove seitan patties from the broth and let them sit out to cool off. At this point, you can do all kinds of things with your seitan chicken creation (like make vegan meatballs, vegan seitan tacos, or many other things). I used it to make chicken fried steak. Below, I’ll outline more or less how I did it.

2. Coat each chicken patty in the flour first, then the egg/soy milk mixture, then the cracker mixture. Really pack on the cracker crumbs so it has a nice thick coating.

3. Pour about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a pan. Let the oil get really hot before adding the patties. Once it’s hot, add the patties and cook each side until browned and crispy.

3. Yum. Now you’ll have quite a few large seitan chicken steaks. Invite a lot of friends to eat it with you because you probably won’t want to eat them all yourself.

So now…what do you do with all the leftovers?

The chicken fried steak was even better the next day – it became denser and more steaklike on the inside. We sliced it into thin strips, heated them in a pan with some gravy, added some leftover mashed potatoes, and made breakfast tacos!

We’ve made this recipe twice now and it is absolutely delicious! My husband looves chicken fried steak so we decided to try it out – so glad we did. We’ve also made your seitan tacos which were equally yummy. Well done!

Evertything looks soooo delish! It’s amazing to me how scary people are to try vegan foods. I called my daughter-in-law over to show her the gluten I had made from scratch and she turned her nose up at it lol. I told her she could take some home so she could fix it for my son and told her she could make chicken fried steak with it and she said he would have to come and get it. She just refuses to like anything I fix that is vegan, even though other people tell her h0w good it is. I’m trying teach her how to cook some things that my son wants her to fix for him, but she just refuses lol. I think she is just afraid of what her family will say if she starts cooking more vegetarian. Now if I make a pie or something sweet then she will eat that even though it doesn’t have eggs in it and it’s organic, then she will eat it, but the meat products, she just won’t eat. She’s funny, but we get along great!

Wat and I tried this recipe out for party here in Dallas not too long ago. We had the steaks with buns and toppings like a chicken fried steak sandwich kinda deal. They were a big success. By the end of the night, any time somebody new arrived one of the party-goers would walk them through the food area and say something like, “These are the best thing here,” or “You have to try these first, they’re really good.” We made two huge batches and were sure there would be so many leftovers but they all got eaten.

@ arch stanton No she’s really nice my daughter in law just scary of going vegan, cause no one in her family is. I don’t know why some people are so afraid of trying our meat substitutes but. They will try calamari, alligator, snake, etc and to ME to eat that is wrong and gross because these creatures were deemed unclean by God. If they want to eat the clean I say knock yourself out but the unclean Gross

I know this post is several months old, but I’m just finding it. Is it possible to make this and freeze it before frying so that I can have it whenever I want to? The recipe sounds awesome but I wouldn’t want to go through all of this each time I wanted to fix it for the family. I wouldn’t be preparing it for a huge number of people.

I find that will will have more product when you boil it. It doubles in size. I have been making this for years. I have a big family and it helps when things double in size. love it!!. looks delish.. YUMMERS!!!!!!!!!

Hey nancyah, I’m with you on the clean and unclean foods. To me it’s a no brainer. People will stuff their bodies full of unclean meats, chemical filled processed foods, and wash it all down with sugar and chemical loaded drinks, but will turn their noses up to eating clean, natural, and healthy vegetarian foods. I’m convinced that 97% of people today are idiots. If the old saying is true, you are what you eat, then most people today are trash. Forrest Gump’s mom was wise when she said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

the funniest thing about what the above poster says is that not every vegan eats clean, natural, and healthy foods. call me ignorant because I’m 18 but even though I have been raised vegan (and still am!), as far as I’m concerned, the more unhealthy the food is, the better. even though they aren’t “natural,” or “healthy,” chemicals are vegan. if you’re going to complain about foods being clean or unclean, don’t bring meat and/or vegetarianism into it, because those are completely different things. meat can be just as clean as vegetables, depending on the source.

if you’re only vegan for the health aspects of it, please don’t act like you are better than other people because your morals are way off.

That looks fantastic and I plan on fixing it this weekend! Thank you so much for posting it. The trouble I have is the gravy. I’ve always made my own but now being vegetarian and sometimes having vegan foods, my gravy doesn’t turn out. Do you happen to have a recipe for one you used here. I have several vegetarian and vegan cookbooks but haven’t found one as amazing as this to go with them! Love your blog!